


Nothing Important Happened Today

by thedevilchicken



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel Adventures: Avengers
Genre: Halloween, M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-04
Updated: 2008-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-05 10:57:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4177257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's stuck in a time loop. Sometimes he's not sure he wants to get out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Important Happened Today

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on 4 November 2008 to the cap_ironman Livejournal community for the 2008 Halloween prompt table. The prompt was 9. Tony tries alternate methods of pumpkin carving. 
> 
> The comics continuity of this fic is dubious at best, but I'd say it's half 616 and half Marvel Adventures: Avengers. Make of that what you will!

October 31st that year was nothing to write home about, or wouldn't have been had Steve actually been away from home for it. Tony once had been, a couple of years prior; Steve had gotten transatlantic text messages all night long about how the British really hadn't quite embraced the Halloween ethic, that trick-or-treating was at best a drab affair in the British Isles and he'd seen more convincing costumes on second-graders than the men and women at the party he'd been invited to attend on his business trip. Steve had snickered on the couch in front of the Halloween movie marathon Peter had set up, refraining from informing Tony (whose Bela Lugosi vampire outfit was unlikely to win him any prizes itself, judging from the picture messages) that Halloween had come a long way since he'd been young - he definitely couldn't recall bucketfuls of candy or five-year-olds dressed as the living dead, and as usual he said nothing about the rampant commercialisation of any and all vaguely meaningful holidays, or the steady Americanisation of British culture that he was pleased hadn't extended to the people at that party spending hundreds of dollars on latex, modelling themselves into perfect zombies or werewolves, Freddy Krueger or convention-level Klingons. 

Peter hadn't appreciated him interrupting Friday the 13th with his snickering and the unfortunately loud keypad tones of his cellphone that no one could figure out how to turn off - honestly, though, it was no more annoying than the way Logan insisted on crunching his popcorn, or the phone that kept ringing in the other room with MJ's friends calling to congratulate her on landing the part in the play she'd just auditioned for. Then a gang of overzealous, overfunded and thankfully underplanned self-styled supervillains had attempted to rob a bank (only to wind up holding an upmarket restaurant hostage in a more than usual display of villainous ineptitude), someone blew up a subway station and a helicopter crash-landed in Central Park; come to think of it, after that he'd never found out how the movie ended. They were kept reasonably busy for the rest of the night, spread all over the city in costumes that had nothing to do with Halloween. When he got back, he had fourteen unread texts on his phone, all from Tony and none of them acknowledging the fact that Steve hadn't replied for the last four and a half hours, probably because Tony hadn't noticed. He was amused but not terribly surprised. 

Looking back, that had been the single most eventful Halloween they'd had in years. That year, however, was nothing special at all. Except perhaps for the fact that it started roughly three months too early. 

It all started with drawings. 

Drawings at least he could understand because that was what he did; a lot of the time he was the vaguely creepy blonde guy stationed at that spare bench at the back of Tony's workshop, playing with a box of art supplies roughly the size and weight of Kentucky while Tony... did whatever it was that people called what Tony did. It was too frenetic for tinkering, too definite for experimentation, that strange kind of otherworldly genius in his creations that Steve knew he shouldn't have felt so comfortable around if only because he'd never felt quite so at ease with Bruce or Reed or the myriad geniuses of his acquaintance. But he'd sit there in Tony's workshop for hours on end, set up an easel in there once and Tony had barely batted a lash in his direction while Steve played with his new oil paints and made just about as much mess in his own way as Tony usually did. He never asked what exactly had compelled Tony to make that space for him there. He figured friends didn't question friends' motives. 

Steve knew drawing. Of course, Steve's drawings didn't usually find their way out onto every flat surface (and a few not so flat ones, too, if the leftover Chinese food sitting there on the workbench leaking grease into a couple of them was the yardstick they were measuring by) the way that Tony's had. Suddenly one doodle had spawned twenty full-sized sketches, all from that initial two minutes' work on the back of a business card that really hadn't been big enough for doodling in the first place, especially not with that overly flashy fountain pen of Tony's since all it did was bleed blue-black ink into the heavy stock and make the little picture look extremely sad indeed. Tony had pinned the card up on his bulletin board and stared at it that afternoon while Steve pretended he wasn't staring at Tony staring at it. Then the drawing had started in earnest. Suddenly there were pumpkin faces everywhere. 

Steve knew drawing, knew the creative process; he knew that Tony's engineering was at least as much about aesthetics as it was the mechanical because otherwise the suit, the Suit, would never have looked the way it did. He hadn't been forced to make it in red and gold, after all, and no one could tell Steve that the principles of aerodynamics had been drawn upon heavily in the styling of that faceplate. Of course, Tony had never been designing pumpkins before, like this was a perfectly normal facet of their everyday life and not just another of his eccentricities where they'd come in from a mission or MJ's new play and find Tony had emailed out a poll to every last Avenger to help him decide which of his current favourites was the best. This was a novelty, especially for the middle of a wonderfully warm August - a mercifully quiet August, too, quiet to the point where Peter had started suggesting that all the bad guys who weren't currently deceased or in maximum security were probably off sunbathing on a private Caribbean island. Steve had been stuck with that image in his head for the rest of the day no matter what he did to dislodge it, so it was really only fitting that he scar poor Peter for life with a quick cartoon planted in his jacket pocket: Dr. Doom sipping piña coladas on a sun terrace with a worryingly tiny Speedo on over the armour, flanked by Bullseye and a sunburned Doc Ock. 

Still, Steve hadn't quite been able to see why Tony was contemplating chilly October nights of encroaching ground frost and the over-average chance of rain, or a night that would probably bring out the villains en masse. Perhaps not the big ones - Victor Von Doom did have a well-documented flair for the dramatic, that much was true, but Steve had a feeling that wheeling out the Doombots on All Hallows Eve wasn't quite his style. He tended to prefer to ruin Christmas, they'd found, presumably something to do with his parents not giving Poor Little Victor that private robot army he'd been hinting at all year, or maybe it was just one holiday too far after Halloween and Thanksgiving in rapid succession; still, it was a little difficult to imagine him giving thanks for anything at all, especially not in monarchist Latveria, and the idea of Dr. Doom enjoying Halloween was a little too far-fetched even for Steve's vivid imagination. 

This was probably why Peter found himself with a growing collection of Steven Rogers originals, Doom maliciously incinerating a turkey, Doom trick-or-treating with the Green Goblin and Magneto. Pete told him he might want to quit drawing all the cute little Victor Von Dooms if he didn't want everyone in the building to assume he had some kind of secret crush, but Steve thought the really worrying part was the pumpkin bombs showering candy over Manhattan like little burst piñatas. It all probably had something to do with the fact that by that point they were well into September and there were so many pictures everywhere he went that it was eerily like a million pumpkin eyes were following his every move. Obviously he was cracking up. Tony's pet project was stealing his sanity. 

And then came the pumpkins. 

At first it was just a couple of small ones, two tiny little things sitting there on the kitchen counter when Steve went to make coffee one morning. It was early October by then, at least, not the middle of summer and with all the drawings around he supposed he'd seen it coming; the odd part was that post-coffee he went for a run in the park and when he got back perhaps an hour later, all the drawings were gone. And there were the pumpkins sitting on the counter right where they had been, only now there were creepy little faces drawn on them oh-so-precisely in permanent black marker. 

A couple more turned up each day after that and Jarvis started to cook more pumpkin dishes than Steve had ever dreamed possible - a couple of weeks and Steve and Pete and Logan were secretly conspiring to smuggle in pizza or burgers or even the vaguely toxic-smelling hotdogs that may have had a passing acquaintance with actual meat from the dodgy-looking vendor down the block, anything that wasn't orange or seemed a little like eating the remains of Tony's little science projects. Maybe it was a little strange that no one had really questioned what exactly Tony was doing in all that time but really, it was far from the strangest thing he'd ever done and when they saw him he seemed normal enough, or as normal as Tony ever got. He even ditched the sushi Pepper brought in sometimes and joined the rest of them in their mountains of greasy, cheesy pizza, and whenever Steve was in the workshop, it always seemed like Tony was working on something mechanical rather than doodling a progression of disturbing little faces on large orange gourds. Steve started to wonder if schizophrenia wasn't just around the corner, for one of them or the other. Perhaps both.

Then, at last, the day came. Tony stayed home from the office and after Steve's morning jog they had breakfast together while the others wandered in and out of the room, grabbing coffee or pastries or cereal or fruit on their way to wherever they were going, even if it was just back to their rooms to snooze or play with their Halloween costumes. Tony reminded them all there was a party scheduled for that evening, which explained why Pepper was perhaps more firmly glued to her PDA and her Blackberry than usual and was maybe a little wired on Tony's favourite espresso, and that costumes were most definitely required. Preferably ones that had as little to do with their other costumes as humanly possible. Steve just sat back through it all, sipping his coffee with a smile as he watched Tony play the perfect lord of the manor; once everyone else had shuffled on out, Steve read the newspaper at the kitchen table and got newsprint all over his fingers while Tony sat there and gazed off distractedly at the window rather than out of it - the Extremis probably had him tuned into three different newspapers online while he checked his email and played poker with a banker in Belgium, knowing him. All things considered, it was a pretty good sort of a morning. 

The day went on. Steve's schedule wasn't exactly bulging at the seams so he worked out for a while then took a long, leisurely shower, replied to some email and played a little Solitaire, insisted on helping Jarvis out in the kitchen and narrowly avoided Hurricane Pepper and her attendant flurry of caterers as he headed to the workshop bearing coffee and sandwiches; no doubt Tony had long since lapsed into Tony-space, the place where both time and hunger apparently ceased to exist until someone came in bearing caffeine and something edible, preferably with a large proportion of meat. Something exploded as he approached the door, with a moderate bang and a wet kind of popping sound, and he supposed had he not known that at any time there was likely to be any number of odd or worrying sounds coming from Tony's workshop he might have been wearing a large, burning coffee stain all down his otherwise perfectly white t-shirt, jumping at the shock. He caught himself in time, however, and when he got through the door, Tony was scraping pumpkin off his forehead while quite a lot more of it dripped down his shirt. Pepper, who'd managed to sneak up on him, took one look inside the room and turned right back the other way. Steve honestly couldn't say he blamed her. He put down the plate and cups on the nearest flat surface that wasn't spattered with pumpkin goo and raised his brows at Tony. 

"Was it evil?" he asked, gesturing at the remains of the pumpkin shell that was sitting on the desktop, though honestly the majority of it was layered all over Tony in stringy lengths mixed with bits of seeds. "Did it have to die?"

Tony pulled off his goggles and glared at Steve. Unfortunately for Tony, the fact that he was dripping pumpkin onto the floor off his tanktop and sweats did nothing at all for Steve taking him seriously. Tony shook his head; pumpkin slid out of his hair and hit the floor at his feet with a wet, solid splat. Steve wandered over to the cabinet across the room and tossed him a towel, though that was mostly just to hide his smile for a moment, however brief it may have been. 

"I guess now I know not to use a laser cutter on a fruit," Tony muttered, attempting to rid his hair of the orange goop. He really succeeded only in rubbing it in further and Steve watched him as he leaned back against the nearest unsplattered wall, trying not to plan another cartoon for Peter's collection, thankfully this time omitting Dr. Doom. Unfortunately for all concerned, his imagination got the better of him and soon he headed over to his bench at the far side of the room, grabbed a pencil as he sat and started a quick sketch. Tony followed him over like a rat half-drowned in orange soda, dripping an unfortunate trail of pumpkin innards all over the floor that Jarvis was not going to find amusing in the least. Steve had a feeling he'd end up cleaning it up himself instead, just to keep Jarvis from despair and Pepper's head from exploding much like he imagined the pumpkin had, only without the aid of Tony's ill-conceived laser cutter carving method. For a genius, sometimes his logic left a lot to be desired. 

"You know, traditionally you're meant to take out the insides first," Steve told him, with a smile he didn't try to conceal, glancing up from his drawing board to where Tony was standing, currently yanking off his pumpkin-smeared shirt. It sounded horribly wet as it hit the floor by his feet and Steve found himself making the exact same face that Peter had when he'd found that first cartoon. It wasn't pretty at all.

"Oh, so that's where I went wrong," Tony said, in his favourite tone of well-honed sarcasm, though he seemed to be having a tough time keeping a wry smile from his face. "I never would have thought of that. Thank you, Cap, High King of the Pumpkin Carvers." 

"You can mock me all you like, Tony. I'm not the one who's covered in orange goo."

Tony sighed dramatically and sat himself down on a stool nearby, still attempting to towel himself off. It wasn't working at all, just seemed to be making him progressively stickier and stickier though the array of pumpkin debris at his feet seemed to grow and grow with an intermittent sort of slimy slapping sound in accompaniment. Steve watched him out of the corner of his eye as he drew; he could almost see the wheels turning in Tony's head, going over every little thing he'd done wrong (though Steve would have had to say ‘using hi-tech electrical equipment on a foodstuff' was the only point that mattered), replanning the carving of the pumpkin it had taken him nearly three months to design until Steve took pity on him and abandoned the drawing only half coloured on the desk. With a hefty sigh he left the bench and the two of them spent the rest of the caffeine-fuelled afternoon carving Tony's precious pumpkin. This time without the laser cutter, though somehow they both ended up thoroughly covered anyway - Steve strongly suspected that was mostly Tony's doing.

The party that night went off without a hitch, all of the Avengers and a not inconsiderable number of their friends and acquaintances all dressed up and chatting over overly expensive party nibbles when really all most of them wanted was a paper plate of cocktail sausages and cheese on sticks. It seemed the open bar went down a treat, on the other hand, and Steve couldn't say he was terribly surprised. Logan, with a little more hair than was normal even for him, was propping up said bar dressed as a rather convincing werewolf, making less convincing small talk with a couple of visiting X-Men; Pete and MJ had retreated to a corner with Peter's aunt May, the three of them dressed like something out of the 1920s; Jan and Hank seemed to be the king and queen of the party dressed as Antony and Cleopatra; and Tony... well, Tony had apparently decided against vampirism that particular year and had gone instead for dressing himself up as a Jedi. Steve was convinced that if he hadn't put so much time and effort into designing the admittedly rather unsettling pumpkin that was currently sitting on the counter in the kitchen, the candle inside it having gone out twice already and started to scorch what was left of the poor pumpkin's flesh inside, he probably could've built himself a fully-functional lightsaber to go with the rest of his costume. Instead, he was whipping out what was apparently a genuine Star Wars movie prop at every opportunity and got into a plastic swordfight with Reed Richards, who it seemed had decided to come as D'Artagnan. Steve was just glad Tony hadn't convinced Pepper to turn up as Princess Leia, though Steve himself made a rather dashing Han Solo. It all went surprisingly well, especially considering some of their past parties. 

In fact, the only problem was when the caterers ran out of the odd little hors d'oeuvres that Tony liked, that and Johnny Storm and his little accident with the vodka; fortunately his sister had managed to put out the resulting fire rather quickly, but Tony would still be buying a new rug if the scorch mark and lingering smell of burned wool in the air was anything to go by. Slowly, everyone started to leave or retire to their rooms, leaving just a handful of them sitting around in the lounge sipping beers or coffees as the late night wore on into the early morning. Tony's Jedi cloak was missing in action and MJ's little black bobbed chorus girl wig was abandoned somewhere behind a couch - Jan kept insisting that the poor girl's red hair clashed terribly with her outfit and once Peter had dropped his aunt off at home, he managed to get into a giggle fit that lasted on and off for over an hour over something Steve said that really wasn't funny, so he was the one interrupting the movie that year. Even if it was just something quite genuinely appalling that Tony had dredged out of a secret collection of bad 70s horror. 

Steve finally ambled off to bed one and a half movies later, somewhere about 3am, muttering something about never needing to see Plan 9 From Outer Space again in his life as Pete and MJ fell asleep on the couch and Tony started playing twenty questions with Logan - Steve didn't think it was exactly a fair match, considering Tony was probably the ultimate in quiz show cheating bearing in mind the fact he could Google in his head; Logan didn't seem to mind, however, as he lounged there peeling off sections of fake werewolf hair with one hand, cradling a beer in the other. Steve closed the door behind him, folded his costume and set it down on a chair, brushed his teeth and sank into bed.

It had been a long, long day, and relatively uneventful by their standards. Of course, by that point they'd moved on into the next day and the next month; it was technically November 1st. And that, not Halloween, was when it happened. 

The clock stopped at two minutes to four. He knew this because he was watching it, the clock's luminous green face and its steady ticking just about as soothing as counting sheep and usually more effective at sending him off to sleep. At 03:58:04, the clock stopped ticking. The second hand stopped moving, didn't even quiver. Steve stared at it for a moment, wondering if the batteries had died or maybe it was the clock itself - it wouldn't have been the first time, since the clock had a nasty habit of giving up just at the wrong moment. Tony had nagged him more than once to just go on and get a digital one instead, but he preferred the old style display, found something comforting about it in a bizarre sort of way. Until it did this, of course. 

He changed the batteries with the spares he had in the drawer by his bed; still nothing. He shook it - a fascinating facet of modern technology was that apparently there was a fair to good chance that it would work if you shook it, hit it, kicked it or otherwise abused it, or just turned it off and on again. That didn't work, however, and he resolved to go out the next day and buy himself a digital alarm clock that wouldn't have that horrible habit of dying miserably in the middle of the night, though he supposed he knew he'd never do it. He lay back down, sighed, pulled up the covers and stared up at the ceiling, settling into silence. Which was when he knew that something was wrong. 

The walls there were supposed to be soundproof, that was true. The windows, too, they were apparently designed specifically to keep out the noise that would otherwise have filtered in from outside, all those usual city sounds like the sirens and the car horns, the kind of noises that blended together after a while into a sort of inimitable New York buzz that lurked there in the background through every moment of the day and night, the same backdrop to the day no matter the season, varying only in volume with the time of day. The walls and the windows were supposed to keep it out but all the same there was usually something there that Steve could hear, and he guessed if he could hear it then it was probably just about enough to drive Logan mad, or madder at least. But right then, he couldn't hear it. He couldn't hear Peter snoring softly on the couch the way he usually did or Tony's bright laughter, Logan grumbling under his breath in that way Steve supposed should have seemed vaguely threatening at some point but never really had. There was nothing, not even the white noise of the city. There was silence. 

He left the bed. Quite honestly he wasn't entirely sure what exactly the problem was; as far as he knew Tony hadn't fixed the soundproofing and he hadn't eaten anything that the others hadn't, drunk anything they hadn't, so unless they were all also suffering a bizarre kind of vague hearing loss, vague because he could still hear himself and when he dropped the damn alarm clock on the floor he could hear that too, then he guessed there was something a little odd going on. Likely more than a little odd because when he crossed to the window, shivering as he went and that was odd in itself considering the heating there was usually very good, nothing was moving outside. Nothing. It wasn't just that the road was deserted, which was perhaps strange even for 4am, but there was an eerie kind of stillness out there, like nothing was moving, like the air was still right down to the atom, like Steve Rogers was the only living thing with any motion in the whole damn city. Perhaps he was, and that thought disturbed him, so much he turned and bolted for the bedroom door, reached for the handle and woke in bed to his 6am alarm. 

It didn't feel like a dream, not at all, the sudden influx of sound around him jarring once he'd woken to the persistent beep of the alarm clock that a couple of minutes earlier hadn't been working at all. He could hear the cars outside, the hum of motors was faint but present, the coffee maker burbling into life in the kitchen and the shower running, probably Peter though that seemed odd for a Saturday morning, definitely not Tony or Logan. He got out of bed, frowned at the blue pajama pants he didn't remember putting on but guessed he must have, pulled on a t-shirt and headed for the kitchen. 

There should have been glasses everywhere, plates and napkins, some sign that a party had occurred there quite recently and the high-class caterers had turned out to be somewhat less than inclined to assist in tidying the mess they'd helped to make. There was nothing, except for a copy of his favourite newspaper sitting at his usual place at the kitchen table, the coffeemaker making its oddly comforting low rumbling sound on the counter, filling the room with the glorious smell of espresso. 

"Morning, Cap," Peter greeted him as he wandered into the room, hair still damp from the shower. Steve blinked at him dumbly for a moment, feeling horrendously out of sync though not entirely sure what that meant, but Peter was far too absorbed in the daily Avengers ritual of coffee-worship to notice that Steve seemed out of sorts. Or that it was shortly after 6am and he wasn't outside somewhere in the rapidly cooling streets, jogging like he usually did. Tony still ribbed him about that on occasion, something about there being treadmills in the gym and that way he wouldn't have to be dodging angry dogs or rollerbladers all the time, the blonde girl with the crush on him who he seemed to see every morning without fail. Steve liked to jog, though, and treadmills took a lot out of it, gave him one less reason to get out and actually feel like a normal human being for a few minutes of the day. There was something about being Captain America that had always set him apart from everyone else in a way; however much he understood it was a necessity, that didn't make it easy to swallow all the time. He needed connection - there were just times when Tony didn't seem to understand that the two of them fighting over the remote didn't actually count as that connection. It was something, yes, maybe something valuable, but Tony Stark was hardly representative of the United States as a whole. 

Peter handed him a mug of coffee; Steve accepted it gratefully and took a seat at the table. He picked up the paper. The date on it was the 31st. 

"Peter, have you seen today's newspaper?" Steve asked, catching him as he was evidently heading back to the room he was sharing with MJ, bearing two cups of coffee and a slice of buttered toast. 

Peter turned back to him with a shrug. "I thought that was today's."

"It's the 31st's," Steve told him, holding it up to show him the front page, the same article about corruption in the DA's office that he'd read the previous morning. 

"And that's wrong... because?"

Steve frowned. "Because that was yesterday, Pete." 

"Uh, okay." Peter frowned right back at him. "I think you're imagining things, Cap. I mean, just wait till Tony gets up, I bet the first thing he does is remind you to wear a costume tonight that doesn't come with a shield or too many stars." He paused and took a sip of his coffee, lounging there against the doorframe like Steve wasn't staring at him oddly. "What are you wearing, anyway? MJ got us these great suits from the play she's in. I don't look a lot like Al Capone but maybe I can pull off Generic 30s Gangster even if I'd probably make a better Eliot Ness."

Steve was understandably more concerned with what it was that Peter was saying underneath all the idle costume banter than reminding him he'd actually been alive at the time of Prohibition. 

"You're telling me it's Halloween?" he said. 

Peter nodded. "I'm telling you it's Halloween." 

"And I'm telling you that was yesterday." Steve sighed, rubbed at his eyes with one hand. "I remember it. Tony blew up a pumpkin and Johnny Storm set the rug on fire, the one Tony brought back from Nepal." 

"The one that looks like Picasso painting a tiger eating a monkey?"

Steve nodded. Peter, however, just looked at him quite like one or both of them had lost their mind but wasn't sure which. Steve was quietly starting to believe that one of them had, and it was probably himself, when MJ came in, in search of her coffee and toast. 

"MJ, what day is it?"

She frowned as she snagged the toast from Peter and took a big bite. "It's Halloween," she said. "Why?"

Steve winced. "I think we'd better wake Tony."

Peter nodded. "Stay right there," he told him, and MJ took a seat at the table as she eyed the both suspiciously. "MJ, stay with Cap. I'll be right back." 

He retreated from the room muttering something about being an extra in a Bill Murray flick. Steve got the sinking feeling that he wasn't far wrong. 

"That's not possible," Tony said, the first and second days. 

"That's not possible!" Steve said, the third, fourth and fifth days, doing his very best impression of Tony. Tony didn't look anything close to amused, though everyone else in the room did, quite a lot. Then again, Tony was the only one who knew that had been exactly what he'd been about to say. 

Tony scanned the building; Bruce scanned Steve. Neither of them came up with anything out of the ordinary, or at least out of the ordinary for the Avengers' HQ and Captain America. Steve was definitely Steve and it was definitely Halloween and yet Steve could tell them all exactly what was going to happen; Tony had to admit that yes, he'd been thinking of using his laser cutter to carve his blessed pumpkin and when MJ got home she'd gotten the part, not to mention the fact that while the party went ahead because hell if anyone could find anything wrong aside from the obvious fact that Steve was reliving a day, Steve was on hand ready with the fire extinguisher when, with the aid of Tony's best vodka, Johnny Storm set the rug on fire. They all sat around in the lounge afterwards, debating the feasibility of a time loop versus Steve suddenly being precognizant or deciding that April Fools' Day now somehow fell in late October. Steve wasn't sure he could've planned all this if he'd tried.

He watched the clock. At 3:58am, the clock stopped. Everything stopped - there was no talking, though Tony had been on his usual technobabble roll on the phone to Reed Richards, no movement; when Steve leaned over and pressed his fingertips to the space just under Tony's jaw, where his pulse should have been pumping hard just underneath the surface, there was nothing. He was cold, his skin retaining the shape of the tips of Steve's fingers like some kind of human clay when he moved away. He didn't want this. He felt sick. This was almost panic. It was happening again. 

He woke with his alarm at 6am. Then they did it all again. And again. And again.

He'd seen Groundhog Day enough times before then, ironically, and that one episode of Stargate: SG-1, the Mystery Spot ep of the show that MJ liked so much though they pretty much all suspected that was just because she had a crush on Jared Padalecki. Unfortunately, each movie or show had a different take on the mechanics of what was happening within it - SG-1 had it down as some kind of alien mechanism and while Steve wasn't exactly a charter member of the fan club for Skrulls, he had a feeling they weren't in the business of tinkering with time or persecuting him in particular. Supernatural blamed it on a maybe-demon called Loki - Thor assured him, had assured him numerous times on numerous iterations of that godforsaken Halloween since oddly it seemed he was always the first to believe him, that it just couldn't be their Loki that was doing this. There was a long, complicated explanation as to why, steeped in mythology that Steve found himself curiously understanding less and less as the days went by, but when Thor sounded so very definite it was extremely tough not to believe him. At least that was one possibility that he could set aside.

He supposed in the end, in his philosophical moments that started to come with more and more alarming a frequency as the days or day went by, much like the movies and the shows in which it happened the trick was to find the definition that fit his universe. Unfortunately for Steve, he lived in a universe where gods and monsters, aliens and bizarre new technologies all existed, not to mention magic and that indefinable something that could, admittedly infrequently but even so, just mean the whole goshdarn universe was out to get you. It was difficult to know what to do, especially when it seemed that his friends just couldn't help even with all their combined effort. Maybe if they'd had more time, he thought, more than 6am one day to not quite 4am the next, not even 24 hours and even less when factoring in how he had to sit them down and convince them day after day that this really was what was happening, the serum in his blood hadn't finally driven him out of his mind, he wasn't secretly a Skrull and no one had him under mind control. He could remember the day that hadn't yet happened but for him had happened twenty, thirty times by then. Even sleeping through that time made not one tiny iota of difference. He just wished he knew why it was happening.

After the first forty-three days, he just stopped trying to convince anyone. He took a day off and ate ice cream in bed while watching MJ's DVDs of Grey's Anatomy, then went to the party and got good and hammered on an epic run on tequila slammers with Logan and Carol and someone's cousin who actually didn't quite look old enough to drink. Tony kept eyeing him oddly from across the room and Steve felt progressively guiltier and guiltier as the night wore on; Tony extricated him from Logan's hard-drinking clutches around midnight and took him to his room. Throwing up three pints of chocolate ice cream and a most of a bottle of tequila while Tony, dressed as a Jedi, rubbed his back in an oddly comforting manner, had never been high on his to-do list. Right then he knew exactly why. 

He passed out in bed, fully clothed and clinging sickly to an oddly accommodating Tony sometime around 3am. When his alarm woke him at six, he had no trace of a hangover. Tony was gone. It was Halloween again, and he felt like he'd wasted a day. He told himself that wasn't something he'd be doing again.

Perhaps that was why he started it all again. He wasn't trying to convince anyone, he was past that point, had it down to a fine art stored up in the back of his head so that if, by some miracle, he happened to come across a solution before he lost his mind entirely, he'd be able to sit them down and run up the flag of Universal Explanation to enlist their help with relative speed. But, for a start, that wasn't what he did; if movies had taught him anything it was if at first nothing big leapt out to be corrected he should examine each and every last facet of his day to make sure there wasn't some infinitesimally minute detail that he'd overlooked, someone he was supposed to help, somewhere he was supposed to be, something he was supposed to do that was keeping him from moving on past four hours into November. It might have seemed a daunting task if he hadn't been facing multiple Halloweens stretching on and on into infinity. At the very least, it gave him a purpose that wasn't connected with ice cream and liquor and Tony Stark fetching him bottles of expensive imported mineral water to ward off the hangover that was never going to come. 

Fourteen days later, he knew just about everything there was to know about everyone who ever entered or left the building on a regular basis, his fellow Avengers and visitors and staff. Twenty after that he'd been on first name terms (albeit briefly) with the parents and siblings and co-workers and high school sweethearts of just about everyone who'd come in for the party that night, including the catering staff and every taxi driver who'd been involved in dropping off or collecting their guests. There was nothing, aside from a few people he'd probably be calling on should this day ever end, alcoholics and a girl whose long-lost sister he'd somehow managed to track down. He was drawing a blank.

After that, he moved further afield. Slowly, he met everyone he could, sat strangers down for coffee, prevented every crime one by one that he could recall from the thousands reported to the city police that day, then quite a few besides that hadn't been. Nothing changed at all, not with anything he did, all the people that he saved, all the effort he exerted; each and every morning it was October 31st again and Steve could just have screamed. In the end, he did. He went ahead and broke things after some brief and not-so-careful consideration, starting with his alarm clock, only for them to reappear as if by magic the next morning, that morning, the same morning every single day. There was that same odd stillness there at two minutes to four, exactly four minutes and fifty-three seconds of it if his count was correct, and then suddenly it was 6am again. 

Something needed to change. So then he just stopped trying, at least for a little while.

Days got more interesting after that, somehow. He spent an hour in the grocery store buying all the different kinds of fruits he could find and tried them all at lunch while Tony and Pepper both looked at him like he'd turned into an ape or told them he was giving up the shield and going into NASCAR. He spent a fortnight perfecting his chess game, crewed a catamaran and dyed his hair black. He got a tattoo one day, decided he hated it and was actually vaguely thankful for the first time in as long as he could remember that in the morning the day was just going to start over, no harm no foul and without the presence of a rather unfortunate-looking Japanese symbol there on his bicep. He'd always thought they were a faintly bad idea, especially when most of the people that had them didn't actually speak Japanese, but as a learning experience it served him quite well. He wouldn't be doing it again, after all, and wouldn't have to wonder if he'd been missing out all those years. 

So then he learned Japanese. CDs from the local bookstore only went so far but he had Logan to help out, Logan who thankfully wouldn't be remembering the six weeks of free conversation classes he gave between beers and griping and protestations that if he wanted to learn Japanese he should just suck it up and go to Japan. The tattoo had been mistranslated mumbo-jumbo, as it turned out. He couldn't say he was exactly surprised. Given the overall cleanliness of the parlour he'd been to, he considered it a miracle he hadn't dropped dead of some kind of poisoning fifteen minutes after leaving. 

He kissed Carol, which ultimately wasn't worth the broken rib she gave him just on reflex, even if it went ahead and healed miraculously by the next morning. He spent two days straight playing some kind of ultra-violent video game, finding it curiously satisfying to massacre zombies with a shotgun even if the controls for it had been completely incomprehensible for the first six or seven hours; after that it just clicked into place and by the time Logan wandered in to sit himself down in front of a sports channel until the party was ready to go, Steve was wholly unwilling to give up the TV for sports news or possibly horror movies. His thumbs may have ached like he was over eighty in body as well as technical age, but if he ever needed to defeat villainy via the medium of Resident Evil, he was all set. 

Ordinarily, in any one week he'd spend maybe an few hours with a sketchpad and a box of pencils, lounging on the couch while Logan grumbled over hockey scores and Peter worked on lesson plans at the table. Since the start of Halloween he was sort of surprised and conversely sort of not to find that he'd been almost actively avoiding spending any time sketching at all - it wasn't that he felt he had to have something to show for every time he sat down to draw, but still the prospect of drawing something and finding he was really proud of the finished result only to have it vanish into the ether was vaguely galling. The only problem with that was that by that point he was heading past a hundred days or more at least and that was a long time to be without his favourite pastime. He went down to the park, bundled up in his jacket and scarf and one glove, wishing faintly that he could draw with gloves on both hands. He sat by the kitchen window and sketched the view from it idly as he hummed along with the bad Halloween radio show that he'd heard fifty times before by that point. Then he went down to Tony's workshop and sketched Tony with the laser cutter, knowing full well that in a few minutes it was going to blow up a poor, unsuspecting pumpkin all over him. 

Right on cue, it did exactly that. Steve hadn't actually seen the look on Tony's face at the moment it happened before, he'd always been outside the room, and he had a feeling it was going to be a couple of years of that day before he forgot one tiny detail of it. Tony cursed rather colourfully, shook his head and splattered pumpkin parts all over the floor like a dog shaking off water and managed to catch Pepper's new shoes as she peeked through the door. Wisely, and just as usual, she turned around and went the other way while Tony pulled off his goggles and looked over at Steve as if daring him to say something. He refrained. He had a feeling he knew what Tony's reaction would have been if he'd said anything and potentially amusing as that might have been, he decided against it. 

He went back to his drawing, adding in the pumpkin, catching it mid-explosion and amending the look on sketch-Tony's face to something approaching what it had been in real life, perfect comic horror that made Steve smile even when he knew Tony was peering over his shoulder. Of course, one of the main ways he knew that Tony was peering over his shoulder was that a wet, stringy strand of pumpkin hit his shoulder and managed to slither its way under the neck of his t-shirt. It oozed right down his back and thankfully caught at the waist of his jeans. He supposed it served him right. 

"I guess you found that amusing," Tony said, pulling off his shirt. He dropped it to the ground by Steve's desk, wincing at the rather horrific sound it made weighed down with all that wet, pumpkin-smelling mess. 

Steve smiled rather broadly, despite the fact he was wiping pumpkin from the small of his back with a tissue from the desktop. "Actually, I did," he said. "I guess now you know not to use a laser cutter on a fruit."

Tony looked at him oddly; Steve knew exactly why, considering he was repeating exactly what Tony had told him that very first day of pumpkin-explosion. Fortunately he seemed to shrug it off and started his traditional attempt at towelling unfortunate-smelling orange goo off his skin while Steve watched him do it for at least the twentieth time. The pumpkin clung to the same places each time, he thought, part of a seed lodged in Tony's hair by his ear, bits collecting at the waist of his sweats until he tried to rub it away with the towel and succeeded only in pushing it down under them a little, a fact he acknowledged every time with an unhappy sort of sound and a look on his face almost as amusing as the one Steve had down on the page. 

Then he put down his pencil and leaned over. He licked lightly at Tony's exposed abdomen, an almost horizontal line just above the waistband of his sweats - it just seemed like the thing to do at the time, even if the angle strained Steve's neck a little, even if he tasted of raw pumpkin and that was hardly the most tempting taste in the world. Even if he hurt himself, he only had to make it to 3:58am and that particular slate would be wiped clean. 

"Steve, what are you doing?" Tony asked a moment later, setting his hands at his hips but not actually moving away from him. Steve supposed that should've told him something, supposed it should've been his cue to stop but honestly, that was the first time in a week of Halloweens, two weeks, three, he was losing count, that he'd felt anything like excitement. 

He looked up at him from his awkward angle, his neck cracking uncomfortably. "I would've thought that was obvious," he said. And he licked him again just to make sure they both understood. It seemed they did. 

That wasn't the day that they slept together. Eventually, once Steve had dipped his tongue into Tony's navel and made him shiver, grazed his nearest nipple with his teeth and traced his still sticky abdomen with his fingertips, he pulled back and somehow went on just as if nothing had happened at all. Tony eyed him oddly as they carved that same damn pumpkin Steve could've carved in his sleep by then, but otherwise he played along. Steve was glad; he needed some time to process what he'd done. He was surprised to find just how much time it didn't take. 

The next day, he kissed him. He waited until lunchtime, until he heard the then familiar sound of pumpkin explosion inside Tony's workshop, shooed Pepper away and then let himself in; he said nothing, not a word, just stepped right up to him with an unfortunate kind of slip on a big glob of exploded pumpkin and the next thing either of them knew Steve's mouth was colliding with Tony's, awkward and a little too hard. Tony blinked at him in bemusement like he wasn't a certified genius as Steve pulled back; Steve just frowned, sighed and walked back out the way he'd come. The next day was better, no slip, their mouths meeting slowly and Steve found he didn't even mind the pumpkin juice that was clinging to Tony's goatee, or that globs of it on his shirt that pressed wetly to Steve's as they moved closer together. Under the bright tang of pumpkin, Tony was warm and tasted like coffee. Steve couldn't even pretend to dislike it. 

By the fifth day, he had the kiss down perfect and Steve was starting to wonder if pumpkin was in fact some kind of heretofore unknown aphrodisiac. He pulled off Tony's shirt and Tony let him, pulled off his own and dropped them both to the floor as he kissed him again. Bare skin on skin was thrilling even with the sticky pumpkin juice rubbing off on his chest and Tony didn't seem to mind much considering the way he pushed him up against the nearest bench, sucked at his nipples then promptly dropped to his knees and proceeded to give him one of the top five blowjobs of his life to date. Afterwards, they carved the damn pumpkin. They drank some coffee, ate bagels at the kitchen counter while the radio played every cheesy Halloweenish song they could think of and then some. He couldn't decide if he was surprised or not that there wasn't much between them that seemed to have changed because of what they'd done there in the workshop. It all seemed to make some weird kind of sense, at least as much as reliving the same day over and over and over. Apparently there wasn't much in the way of sense left in Steve's world.

It was the sixth day that they slept together. They kissed in the workshop, Steve's hands in Tony's pumpkin-slimy hair, and when Tony made for his knees just like before Steve stopped him, turned him, sank to his knees instead. He didn't have a lot of experience, fumbled his way to dragging down Tony's sweats and the underwear beneath, shifted awkwardly on his knees against the hard cement floor as he looked up at him. There was no doubt in Steve's mind that Tony had been on the receiving end of this countless times in his life but he looked sort of surprised anyway, gasped in a breath as Steve touched his tongue to the head of his cock for the first time and wrapped his fingers around the base. A few more seconds, a few more tentative licks with the tip of his tongue and Tony was hard in his hand and gripping tight at the edge of the worktop; Steve sucked at him experimentally, made Tony buck forward with his hips as he stroked him not terribly smoothly but that seemed just fine. He guessed he needed practice but Tony seemed to like it - he came with a shiver, a gasp, a hitching breath and a moan that he didn't bother to hide as Steve swallowed around him. Apparently, he wasn't as bad at this as he'd thought. That or Tony was easy to please. 

The rest they didn't do in the workshop. In fact, the rest came later - Tony pulled him out of the party and dragged him to his room, stripped him right out of the Han Solo costume and told him then in no uncertain terms just exactly what he wanted him to do. He produced a tube of lube and a packet of condoms from a drawer there by the bed, rolled a condom onto him quickly then slicked the both of them while Steve watched, rapt. Steve took him from behind, bent over the desk in the corner of the room. It probably shouldn't have felt as good as it did, considering Steve wasn't sure he'd stopped his near full-body blush the whole time. But it was good. Surprisingly so. It was a good thing Tony wasn't going to remember. 

\---

He still woke at 6am.

It went on after that, between vague attempts to free himself of his never-ending time loop that never seemed to work no matter what he did. Tony, though, there was never a time when Tony said no, no matter what it was that Steve suggested, and for a while that didn't bother him at all - after all, he'd never known there to be any real possibility of making Tony do anything he didn't want to do. They did it in the workshop bent over the benches, Tony's room and Steve's, before and after the party that Steve hadn't even wanted to attend the first time, during it more than once. They did it in Tony's overly large shower, on their knees, Tony's hands pressed to the cold tile wall and Steve's arms wrapped around Tony's waist as he moved in him. He marked him shamelessly more than once, hickeys at his neck or his chest, the inside of one thigh before he stretched out on top of him, Tony's legs going up to wrap loosely, comfortably, around Steve's waist. The whole thing was just so wonderfully decadent, wholly unexpected, and Tony... actually Tony just seemed just like himself, if a touch quieter, even when Steve asked if he'd like to try things the other way around. 

It went on. Days of getting to know Tony's body so thoroughly he was sure he knew it almost better than his own, small scars, the curve of muscle beneath the skin, the texture of his hair and how that differed from his head to the neatly trimmed goatee, the coarse trail that led down from his navel, the finer hair over his shins that made him grumble but smile when Steve rubbed it the wrong way. Steve got to know all the ways that Tony could make him feel, the differing weights of his touches and the sounds they would elicit if he let them. He taught himself to relax through the odd initial shock of penetration, watching Tony's eyes, the expression on his face as they had sex, Steve's hands not shy of leaving marks on him perhaps only because he knew that by the morning they'd be gone. He even persuaded him into the suit just once or twice, one cold, slick metal finger sliding inside him, brushing almost torturously against his prostate with each slow, deep thrust until he came with an embarrassing shout all over Tony's worktop. He knew he should have been ashamed. It was just that by that point it was hard to find it in himself to be. 

Of course, eventually the guilt had to set in. Steve wouldn't have been Steve if it hadn't occurred to him at some point that really this was wrong, not exactly on a par with world hunger or international terrorism, and it wasn't as if Tony wasn't perfectly willing each and every time because he was, every time. Steve had never felt like he'd forced the issue, but that wasn't the point and God knew he wasn't ashamed the way he was because of some kind of latent homosexuality - he was far past that. He just knew he was seducing him under false pretences, knowing there was no way he would've done it in any normal circumstance, only because he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Tony wasn't going to remember any of it at all - he'd wake the next day without a single memory of the day before, no matter what they did, where they did it or how and Steve didn't have to deal with the consequences of his actions. He didn't have to live with trampling all over the friendship that they had. That was more important to him than any attraction he felt, more important than anything else. 

It had all felt strangely liberating that first time, for a while after that, but it had to catch up with him in the end that essentially what he was doing was taking advantage. Then, one morning, he just couldn't do it anymore. He sat down to breakfast with Tony just like he had for the weeks before that. They had coffee and Tony indulged in a hot, buttered croissant just the way he had for weeks and weeks on end, to the point where the previously wonderful, tempting smell of it was almost enough to turn Steve's stomach. Nothing had changed but he knew he couldn't do it again. He wasn't sure how he'd managed to live with it for so long. 

He turned back to the real problem then, of course, suspecting from the get-go that it was more to do with the fact that he needed to escape from Tony and the way he imagined he was looking at him than with any real hope that he was ever going to solve the problem. After all, considering the fact that he'd had Reed Richards, Hank Pym, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner amongst other all working on the problem for countless days, given weeks to it himself, he just wasn't sure how much more there was that he could do. At least not in New York City. Perhaps that was a brainwave. 

Weeks prior, he'd investigated the possibility of a crisis occurring somewhere else in the world; he'd found nothing, nada, a big fat bupkis, even with Tony and his handy in-head computer working for him. Of course, that didn't mean there weren't problems of a smaller nature than natural disasters or terrorism, weapons of mass destruction or maybe Doom deciding that Latveria needed to expand its borders. Suddenly there was nothing so small it could escape his notice; Steve took a Quinjet every morning, headed out in an odd but systematic pattern about the globe. Fires in India, a small flood in Pakistan... there was a boating accident in Indonesia that he helped to clear up twice and prevented three times before he was sure there was nothing more he could do. There were still people dying all over the world, preventable deaths, but the more he did the more he realised there were places he couldn't be, things he just couldn't coordinate. But it drove him. There were going to be no deaths from unnatural causes that day by the time he'd finished, he swore that to himself. 

But bit by bit, it was starting to wear him down. There was so much to remember when he woke up every morning, places he forgot that plagued him until he wasn't sure how much he could go on anymore without that ache in his chest when one of them slipped his mind from the lists in his daily despatches to whoever he thought could help while he went elsewhere to find more, save more. All those people, names he half remembered in those not-quite-five minutes of calm as the day rebooted to 6am. It didn't matter that it was Halloween. He couldn't believe he'd been sitting at a party that first day, laughing, smiling like there was nothing wrong in the world. Now the day went on forever; the only thing he hadn't tried was death and that wasn't for him. The day would go on.

"You look tired," Tony told him at breakfast one morning. He'd never said it before; anything new was good, or so the movies told him, and he frowned at him across the table. He'd had the exact same amount of sleep as he always had, thanks to his own private time loop, was ostensibly the same in every way as he'd been that first morning months of that day ago. But he felt drained. He felt tired. Much more and he'd be empty, completely, that was all there was to it. 

"I guess I am," he replied. 

Tony nodded, and poured him another cup of coffee. "You have plans today?"

"Well..."

"Cancel them." Tony took his seat again, looking at him over the table, his brows raised. "Go back to bed. Just take a day off, Steve, you look like you're about to fall down unconscious or burst into tears. Both, were that a physical possibility." 

He couldn't very well tell him he had plans to save the world, and anything less he had a feeling Tony was going to tell him to blow off for sleep - when Tony made up his mind, he was extremely difficult to ignore or override. He left his bagel half finished and dutifully trudged back off to bed. And he slept, even will ten thousand lives on his mind and his conscience. He supposed they'd be there for him to save again tomorrow. There was a whole slew of emails winging their way out across the world anyway - the people he'd found so far would be safe, at least. 

The hours ticked by - lunchtime came and went. It was almost 4pm when Steve finally hauled himself out of bed and wandered to the kitchen via the bathroom, grabbed a couple of coffees and headed for the workshop. Pumpkin #1 was already splattered all over the floor, three surfaces and a wall, and Tony was putting the finishing touches on Pumpkin #2 as Steve stepped through the door, avoiding the scattered debris so easily it might as well not have been there at all. 

"Voila," Tony said, stepping back from the bench with a flourish, brandishing a scalpel that he'd apparently been using to vastly greater effect than the laser cutter. Then he tossed it aside with a clatter to take one of the cups from Steve with a small, grateful smile. He took a sip, grimaced at the heat of it then took a seat on a stool at the bench. Steve pulled one up beside him. 

"Feeling better?" Steve shrugged noncommittally. "You don't look better."

"Thanks, Tony." Steve smiled wryly. "I mean that."

"Why don't you just tell me what's wrong?" Tony took another sip of his coffee, then set it down on a great glob of pumpkin, caught it only just in time to prevent an accompanying coffee cascade. "You're starting to look like you want to throw yourself out of the nearest window. What's changed since yesterday?"

Steve chuckled a little, almost bitterly. "A lot's happened since yesterday," he said. He guessed that was the truth, in an odd sort of way that almost defied explanation. He sighed, shook his head. "You're not going to believe a word of it." 

"Try me."

He looked serious enough about it, Steve had to admit, even scowling at his over-hot coffee that he just wouldn't leave alone though he probably knew the exact speed at which it was going to cool. That was Tony, though, impatient and impulsive, the perfect kind of billionaire though Steve had never quite worked out whether that would have been the case had he not had the money or if that was where his demeanour came from. He suspected Tony would be Tony no matter what, which was at least a little comforting in its own way. Tony was the same man who'd believed him before. He supposed he didn't have a lot to lose, and so that's why he told him. 

It was quite the story, no real finesse to it maybe just because Steve wasn't sure he had any kind of refinement left in him then, least of all finesse. His pre-prepared persuasive lecture fell by the wayside though he supposed that would've been the simpler route, but he guessed if he'd wanted simplicity he could just have walked away and had done with it. As it was, he stayed and he told him. He told him all of it from start to finish, tired and damn near ashamed and overflowing with it all once he'd begun, the workshop suddenly a confessional though Tony was just about as far removed from ecclesiastic as Steve thought it was possible to be. 

He told him about the tests, the weeks of that when no one had had a clue how to help him and even when he'd done his best to prove that what he said was true there'd always been some small but invariable note of scepticism present. He'd tracked down Loki once, with Thor's help, just to make sure it wasn't him. None of Tony's technology had ever been able to help. Dr. Strange had had no answers. He'd been through every detail, every conceivable variable, so many times they were practically etched there on his brain and nothing had ever worked at all so now, now he was slowly trying to save the world, just for one day. There was really no wonder he was tired. 

Then he took a breath and he told him the rest, the Teach-Yourself-Japanese and how he looked with black hair, making pizza from scratch, the first time they'd kissed. Tony didn't seem too convinced of the latter at first but Steve supposed his weary kind of solemnity as he told him a little of what they'd done and how many times they'd done it must have said something about his honesty. 

He took it surprisingly well. A few moments of silence as he thought it through then he just shrugged. 

"You know, we should run a few tests," Tony told him in the end. 

Steve shook his head. "You've already run them all, Tony. A hundred times."

"But..."

"No buts. I'm done."

Tony nodded, for once surprisingly compliant, and they lapsed into silence as they sat there together. Tony fetched a couple of bottles of water from the refrigerator across the room and they drank together in silence, too. Still, he couldn't quite wish he hadn't told him. 

When they kissed, it was Tony that started it. Steve had started to feel that there was no way for him to feel surprised about that day anymore in any way at all but there it was, Tony's mouth finding his about as subtly as a freight train, goatee tickling his chin as those rough, blunt but terribly well-manicured hands of his found their way to the back of Steve's short hair. It was unexpected the way nothing else had been for weeks, maybe months, so long since he'd really known for sure how long it'd been. And maybe he'd told himself this could never happen again but it really wasn't happening again, now was it. Those were Tony's hands trailing down firmly over his torso, Tony was the one taking the initiative then, even if Steve supposed he'd been the one who'd put the idea in his head. 

"Have I ever told you how long I've wanted to do that?" Tony asked once he'd pulled back, his voice sounding there right by Steve's ear, the tone low and dark. His breath there made him shiver, or maybe that was the tone too. 

"Not exactly," Steve replied. His mouth felt dry. "We've never done much talking."

"Not like today."

"No," Steve said. "Not like today."

Tony pulled his stool in closer then, close enough that when he pulled himself back up onto it his thighs had to frame Steve's knees; he leaned in, tugged Steve closer by the front of his shirt and kissed him again, that same familiar flavour of coffee there that somehow Steve found intoxicating though he doubted it had much to do with the caffeine. Tony sucked at his bottom lip, teased it a little with his teeth and his tongue and then pulled back, settling his hands at Steve's knees. He looked at him, closely - Steve could see and almost feel Tony's eyes moving over him, the look in them different now somehow, darker and deeper. 

"For God's sake, Steve," he said, his voice still low with that tone to it that made Steve's eyes widen just a fraction, made his stomach tighten. "If you don't kiss me right now I'm going to get a complex, and you know how I feel about psychiatrists."

"In your case, they're usually female," Steve pointed out. "And you usually sleep with them."

"And you like me anyway. What does that say about you?"

"Nothing good," Steve said, with a smile. 

He kissed him then. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. 

After a moment, Tony stood as they kissed, slipping from the stool to stand right by him; the abandoned stool and Steve's knees were in the way of him standing in front so he shifted to the side, Steve turning his head to follow the kiss, twisting slightly on the stool. The height of it and Steve on top was just enough that Tony didn't have to stoop at all and Steve, impatient then once Tony's hands were on him, warm over the thin fabric of his t-shirt, kicked the other stool out of the way perhaps a little recklessly. It toppled backwards, hit the floor with a clatter and Tony just chuckled against Steve's mouth as he ran his hands down over his chest, his sides, hips and thighs to his knees that he eased apart to stand between. 

He'd never been like this before, Steve thought, and Steve had never felt so desperate. Before then, it had never been Tony's idea. He wasn't sure what he should do with that, except to let him have his way. 

When Tony tugged up Steve's shirt he let him, snickered when it caught under his chin then under his nose and Tony kissed him that way, with him all caught up in the thin cotton t-shirt that he didn't even try to get out of. Finally Tony did it for him, tossed the damn shirt aside and then his own to join it, stepped back in to kiss him again. Tony's bare arms went around Steve's bare waist and made him shiver, Tony's bare chest pressed to his and Steve's hands went up to one of Tony's biceps, the back of his hair, holding him in. Tony pulled back anyway, a small smile and that characteristic Tony Stark sparkle to his eyes as he didn't so much step back as step around, hand trailing over Steve's thigh, his waist, Steve following with his eyes just as far as he could until Tony pressed his mouth down between his shoulder blades, slow and hot. 

Steve sighed. He hadn't been expecting this at all, and that was odd considering exactly how many permutations of this day he'd been through by then. Tony settled his hands at Steve's hips and moved down further, pressing his mouth down every couple of inches over the length of Steve's spine and then shifted back up, his unsurprisingly prickly goatee trailing right up to the back of his neck, making Steve bow his head and smile as Tony's arms went around him from behind. 

"I guess if I'm not going to remember this we'd better make the most of it," Tony said, murmured against the back of Steve's shoulder. 

"So you believe me?"

"You've never lied to me before," Tony said simply, reaching up to turn Steve's face toward him as Steve turned just a little on the stool, looking back at him over his shoulder. "Why would you start now?"

"It's just that up until now Thor's the only one who's ever believed this without proof."

"Have you ever told me like this before?"

"Well, no."

Tony quirked a brow somewhat wryly. "Well then, there you go." And he kissed him again. 

Steve stood, quickly; he pushed the stool out of the way and Tony shook his head as it clattered to the floor just like the other had. Steve was quick but right then Tony was quicker, whether that was the Extremis in full effect or Steve's mental exhaustion or just the fact that Steve was willing for Tony to do whatever he wanted to do as long as he did it now wasn't terribly clear, but in the end it didn't matter - Tony pushed him up against the nearest bench, the one still sticky with exploded pumpkin, pressed himself right up to him and kissed him again. There was a kind of urgency to it that hadn't been there before, like Tony hadn't been kidding at all and he was intending to really make the most of this. Apparently he knew just how to do it, too. 

"We've done it here before, right?" Tony asked, his voice low and a little breathless as his hands ventured down, thumbs catching at the waistband of Steve's jeans. He shifted, brushed his lips over Steve's throat, pressed a slow kiss to his sternum before he looked back up at him expectantly. 

Steve nodded, hoping he wasn't starting to blush but suspecting he was all the same. "We have," he admitted, with a faint little smile as his mind flicked through all those times. Considering this was Tony's reaction to being told about it all, it was difficult to summon the previously requisite side order of guilt when he thought of one of the two of them being bent over a bench or the ache from kneeling there on the hard concrete floor that they stupidly never seemed to think of counteracting with a cushion. "More than once."

"So, who's usually on top?"

Tony sounded so damn casual about it, interested, intrigued like this was all fine and normal and not the oddest thing he'd heard in weeks. Steve found he couldn't help but smile, shake his head a little in bemusement. 

"I am," he said. "Usually."

"And you want me now?"

"Tony, I always want you."

Tony smiled, practically lit up with it the way Steve hadn't seen him do in weeks, even weeks before Halloween, his hands shifting from the waist of Steve's jeans over his hips to the buckle of his belt. Talented fingers took their time unbuckling it, pulling it apart before he brought his hands to the button there, the back of his fingers brushing against Steve's abdomen as he did so. He remembered a time when waistlines had been much higher, when properly placed jeans would have sat further up, when the way this pair practically hung from his hipbones exposing so much of his abdomen and a strip of white boxers beneath would've been considered completely indecent, but this was one time he could honestly say he was extremely grateful for the change. Tony popped open the button with one deft flick of his wrist, dragged down the zipper, pushed the jeans down over Steve's hips to bunch over his thighs. Steve knew he was doing it but wasn't watching, his eyes right on Tony's face instead, even when Tony's fingers trailed down over his stomach so lightly it almost tickled, even when they toyed with the waistband of his underwear, even when they trailed down over the front of his boxers, tracing the outline of him through the flimsy fabric. Steve took a slow, deep breath. Tony smiled an almost wicked smile and dipped his hand down underneath. 

It was one thing to know how this was supposed to feel, to know how it had felt those times before, and quite another to do it. Tony stroked him slowly and Steve felt himself hardening in his hand, felt his pulse nudge up a notch. Tony shoved the boxers down over Steve's hips and the cooler air hit his warm skin, made him tense for a moment and made Tony snicker as he stroked him again. Then Steve moved, turned, pushed Tony back against the bench instead. He wasn't snickering anymore. As Steve leaned in, pressed his mouth over the pulse in Tony's neck, he heard his breath hitch. When Steve pressed the heel of his hand down over the front of Tony's sweats, Tony was already hard. So he hooked his fingers down into the waistband and pulled down. 

Honestly, Steve was already quite intimately acquainted with Tony's body. It wasn't as if he'd made a detailed study, probably because he would have expired of sheer embarrassment, but he was fairly sure they'd done this often enough, even if Steve was the only one that remembered, that he could've drawn out Tony's naked form on the sketchpad across the room just from memory. Still, when he shifted closer, took Tony in his hand, caught himself too... Tony gasped in a breath like he'd done so many times before and somehow it all still felt so new. He set his other hand at Tony's shoulder, leaned in to kiss him as he stroked them both together like that, Tony's hips shifting a little of their own accord just as Steve's were. When he pulled back, Tony's eyes were dark and his breath laboured, his hand brushing over Steve's hair, his jaw, his shoulder, biceps, pressing to his skin like he just couldn't stop, indecisive about placement but insistent nonetheless. 

"I'm not going to remember any of this, am I," Tony said, flushed. His gaze met Steve's as his hands travelled down Steve's chest, tracing muscles beneath the skin. 

"You haven't so far."

"But you will."

Steve nodded, his hand going still over the two of them. He leaned in closer instead, setting a hand either side of Tony's hips at the edge of the worktop behind them. 

"Well damnit, that's just not fair."

Steve chuckled - he couldn't help thinking that was just Tony all over. He leaned in and pressed his mouth to the side of Tony's neck, the hinge of his jaw, his skin still warm despite the faint chill in the air. "Yeah," he agreed, even if he couldn't say he was sure that he agreed or not. 

"Then if you fuck me over this bench right now, I won't remember it."

If he hadn't been doing so before, Steve definitely blushed a little at that. "Nope. Not for a second."

"Then you'd better make it damn good while it lasts." Tony smiled. It was almost wicked. "I want you. In case you hadn't noticed." He gestured theatrically at his rather obvious erection and Steve found himself laughing in spite of everything. "Hey, I mean it! Right now. There's even some hand cream you can..."

Steve raised his brows at him. "I know," he said. "Tony, I know where everything is in here. I know which file name it is you've hidden your armour designs under. I know where the pep pills are that you really don't need when you drink so much coffee and I know Pepper's told you that at least twenty times. I even found that drill bit you lost last summer." He stepped away slightly, not simple with his jeans lodged around his thighs, leaned back and grabbed the squirty hand cream dispenser from Tony's main workstation. Then he shuffled back to him. "Besides, we've used this before."

Tony crossed his arms over his chest, not managing to look irritated in the slightest when he was mostly naked and smiling faintly the way he was. "And apparently you know everything except how impatient I am right now."

Steve snickered softly and stepped back in. "I know," he said, and slipped one hand down between the two of them, easily, directed. His fingers cradled Tony's balls while his cock rested snugly against the inside of his wrist - he stretched out one finger, teased the smooth stretch of his perineum behind and Tony almost squirmed against him, his complaints immediately forgotten. Apparently he still knew exactly what Tony liked. Maybe those days hadn't been such a bad thing after all. 

"Please don't say you're just going to stand there and tease me," Tony said, his voice suddenly just as unsteady as Steve was beginning to feel. He shook his head, paused then rested his forehead down against Tony's shoulder. 

"I'm not," he said, then took a breath, paused. "Turn around."

Tony, in a rare display of complicity, then did exactly as he was told. He extricated himself from Steve's hands with at least a little reluctance and turned to face the bench, face the wall; for a moment Steve kept his distance, running his hands down over the perhaps oddly pristine skin of Tony's back, tracing his shoulder blades and the line of his spine. Much as Tony had done to him, Steve stepped in to press his mouth against Tony's back between his shoulders, nuzzled against the skin as he moved down a little, just a couple of inches at a time. He'd long since discovered that quick and dirty was all very well but he liked to take his time with Tony - he'd developed favourite places to touch him, the indents at the small of his back where his thumbs seemed to fit just perfectly, the inside of his wrist, the side of his neck where his pulse beat so strongly just beneath the surface, a different tempo for each and every different activity. He stood straight again, pressed close, his own erection caught tantalisingly against Tony's bare back as he ran his hand around to rest against his throat almost possessively, his mouth at the nape of his neck. Tony let him do it, his breath already close to erratic. Steve found himself smiling, didn't care about the specifics of the reason why. 

Then he reached for the hand cream. It was an expensive, unperfumed kind that Logan turned up his nose at every time Tony used it though Steve had a feeling if it hadn't been for his healing factor keeping his hairy skin conditioned in all weathers, Logan wouldn't have dismissed it quite so easily. It did its job and a few more it really hadn't been designed for, like making Tony squirm as Steve guided him down to bend over the worktop and trailed his fingers down between his cheeks. The slippery stuff and Tony's willingness made it easy for Steve to start slipping his first finger inside him, slowly, carefully, as Tony held his breath the way he always did at first. He sighed it out hugely once that finger was in just as deep as it could go, displacing a couple of stray pumpkin sketches from the desk with his breath to float to the floor to rest with their shirts. He let Tony catch his breath before he tried another, stretching him further, lessening the resistance of that tight muscle at his entrance just little by little. A few slow, well-angled thrusts, just like he remembered, and Tony practically writhed against the desk, no pretence at restraint at all. Steve had always liked that about him, how he gave himself over to the way it felt without reservation, how maybe that said a little something about the way he trusted him and in the end, it made it simple to tell when he was ready for more. That and Tony was never exactly shy about asking for it. Pretty soon he started to push back against Steve's hand - he didn't need to be verbal about it, that was enough. 

He pulled back and Tony grumbled irritably under his breath, made Steve snicker as he reached for the hand lotion again. He slicked himself that time, the chill of the lotion making him take a sharp breath the way it always did but he had to admit he kind of liked that, in a way - he'd found out a heck of a lot about himself as well as Tony, that much he couldn't deny. Then he stepped in close, guided himself up into position, the slick head of his cock pressing there snugly to the muscle at Tony's opening. He paused, ran his free hand to Tony's hip, squeezed in reassurance then started to press inside. 

One long, slow slide and he was inside him; a couple of shuffles of his feet, adjustments, and then he was just as deep as he could be, his breath unsteady so he paused to let it even out, to let Tony adjust to the size of him inside him as his fingers pressed tight to the desktop. Steve rested his own hands at Tony's hips, his grip just tight enough to leave white marks when he pulled them away that filled back slightly darker than before, not bruised but the potential was there if he let himself. He didn't. He leaned down, the action pressing him deeper still, and pressed his mouth to Tony's back. 

"Ready?" he asked, voice low and unsteady. Tony just nodded his reply as he attempted to brace himself a little. 

One thrust, two, and Tony moved, swept his hands across the desk - a few sketches got in the way, a pot of drawing pens and his precious pumpkin that went crashing to the floor where it broke into damp, unsalvageable pieces. Collateral damage, Steve thought, trying not to tread on pens to disastrous effect. Tony didn't seem to mind too much, considering the way he cursed just once then pushed back against him. 

Steve knew how Tony liked it, couldn't have helped but develop a sense for it all those times before that still managed to feel nothing like this though how that was even vaguely possible was completely beyond him. Tony liked it hard, liked to be reminded that Steve was bigger than him, stronger than him, so that was what Steve did - his thrusts were deep and hard, a strain in his muscles as he slipped his hands from Tony's hips to the edge of the worktop, gripped there as he flexed his own hips against him. His nails caught at the rough surface of the desk, his breath caught in his throat; Tony didn't even try to keep from cursing, the good kind it had taken Steve a while to understand at first when it sounded so close to vicious but that was Tony, contrary, contradictory to a fault. Fortunately, he liked Tony unpredictable. 

Which was why he didn't complain when Tony stopped meeting his thrusts, when he pushed up instead until his back was flush against Steve's chest. He paused, Steve paused, resting his forehead down against Tony's shoulder before Tony pulled away. He turned, cheeks flushed, caught Steve in a kiss then pushed him away again with an expression that said he really wasn't done with him, he shouldn't worry. There was a sort of odd contortionist act then, Tony almost tripping himself, treading on a hunk of smashed pumpkin though somehow in the end he managed to get one booted foot out of his sweats and underwear - he apparently thought better of trying the other and just beckoned Steve back in at that. 

"Like this," he said, hitching up his freed leg to rest on one of the rungs of the nearest stool, and Steve nodded, knowing this was going to be difficult but he supposed he'd never backed down from a challenge before. He stepped in close, Tony's arm going around him as they attempted to arrange themselves that way, one of Steve's hands at the worktop that was pressing into Tony's back as he fumbled his way into position. They were face to face as he slid back inside him, as Tony bent at a slightly odd angle to kiss him before they moved again, so close together he wasn't sure they could be any closer. 

Tony gasped with every thrust like that was just the way he breathed now, sharp inhalations as Steve leaned against the desk and pushed into him, watching him as he did so. There was a sheen of sweat standing out on their skin that made their movements slicker, even as Steve knew his muscles were jerking, his breath short, his pulse hiked up far enough to make his limbs feel sort of light and heavy all at the same time while a tingle travelled down his spine with every thrust he made. Tony seemed to be holding on for dear life, giddy and smiling with his head tilted back a little as they moved together. Steve's free hand came down between them then, wrapped around Tony's cock and stroked, not managing to keep it in time with his thrusts at all but judging from the way Tony bucked his hips against him he didn't really give a damn about synchronisation. He just shivered against him, kissed him again all hard and deep before he gasped in a breath and shuddered and came somehow in their almost impossible position that jarred their muscles but that just seemed to make it better. Steve wasn't long after, not with the way Tony tightened around him, not after all the times he'd had to tune into the way that Tony's body reacted, to match his own reactions to his. 

They took a moment, their breath almost too loud in the otherwise mostly silent room. Of course it was never really silent, not with the hum of equipment and the vague sounds of the building's other inhabitants moving around in other rooms on other floors, the caterers who were setting up in the kitchen. Steve rested his forehead against Tony's shoulder as he caught his breath, Tony's pulse slowly calming under his fingers. He hadn't realised just how much he'd missed this. 

"Well, that was different," Tony said, smiling faintly as they eased apart. 

Steve took a breath and stepped back in, sticky skin on skin, feeling Tony's arms go around his waist securely. "Actually, it was," he said. 

The party was just the same as always, in a way. Steve knew what was going to happen before it happened, knew each conversation and person and gesture by heart as he moved through the room in his Han Solo outfit, a small plate of Tony's ridiculous party food in one hand and a glass bottle of Coke in the other. He knew there'd be nothing out there that the NYPD couldn't handle, that they'd actually pay some attention to the email he'd sent them the second he was out of bed that morning detailing every last crime he could remember that was set to occur in their jurisdiction and no, the supervillains of the world weren't going to show their faces that night. He knew; he'd done it all before. 

The evening wore on as it always did, as it had so many times that he'd seen, Steve staying out of the way making idle small talk with whoever happened by, occasionally catching Tony's eye across the room with a smile or a raise of his bottle. They'd done that before, sure, down to the point that Tony tugged him aside into the closest room, not really caring it was Logan's as they kissed pressed up hard against the door, costumes crumpling. They'd been doing that all day, after, finding excuses to be in the same place at the same time when there really wasn't a valid excuse at all, Tony pinning him to doors and walls and the kitchen counter before Pepper walked in and almost caught them. It was a welcome change, a welcome distraction from the names in his head that he'd entrusted in those two hours' worth of emails to the appropriate authorities around the world, just the way he'd started to in the days before. There'd just always be more, he knew that. Maybe there wasn't enough time in the day to save them all. 

Johnny Storm set the carpet on fire. The caterers ran out of Tony's favourite hors d'oeuvres. Pete and MJ fell asleep on the couch and fifteen minutes after Steve slipped away from the monster movie to go to bed, Tony came in and joined him. He sighed, Tony spooning up behind him, wrapping an arm around his waist though they both knew when Steve woke in the morning Tony wouldn't be there. Tony wouldn't remember, not a minute of it, not a second. Maybe that, he thought, was the oddest idea he'd had all day. 

That night, he found himself dreading two minutes to four like he wasn't sure he'd ever done before. It took a while for him to realise why, but once he had, well, there it was; this time, for the first time, he wanted Tony to remember. 

He woke at 6am. 

Just like every day, he reached over and turned off the alarm. Just like every day, for a moment he squeezed his eyes shut and steeled himself for two solid hours of emailing that had to come, all the places and times and names and events he had to recall and the order he'd spent so long devising just so no one was missed. Then he shivered. And he looked down. 

His blanket was gone. He was lying there under a thin cotton sheet that was usually there under his blanket, his feet feeling not unlike large blocks of ice. He knew all about that, of course. 

Tony grumbled beside him; Steve's stomach flipped and he turned to find Tony Stark snuggled up right there under the entirety of his blanket, his face covered up to the eyes that were just then cracking open. 

"I thought you were supposed to disappear," Tony said, his voice low and muffled by the blanket until he turned to toss half of it over him, following it up with one arm sprawled over his chest. "Or I was or something."

"Very funny, Ms. MacDowell," Steve said, his heart not in it at all. "Look, Tony, this isn't funny. I've never got this far before. I've never made it past two minutes to four and you're never here and it all starts over again. I..."

Tony leaned over and turned Steve's face to him, warm fingers on his almost icy cheek as he settled closer. He looked him in the eye and then he kissed him, apparently morning breath be damned, and he supposed it did its job because immediately, Steve's attention was on him, freakout averted. "Take a breath," he said. "Then think about it. You must have done something differently. Just work it out."

There had to be something different, Tony was right. There had to be. 

So he thought back, thankful that the day had finally been so different to the forty, fifty, however many days that had come before it because honestly, they'd all begun to blend together into one long, perpetual purgatory of a day that began and ended with people's deaths and the vain hope for the prevention thereof. He hoped to God he hadn't missed anyone from his list. Sooner or later, he was going to have to check. He tried not to think of all the others he could've gotten to with just a few more days. He supposed he knew what lay down that road.

That day, though, that day he'd looked tired, or at least Tony had thought so. He'd gone back to bed and slept for hours after that, gone down to the workshop once he'd woken and told Tony everything but he'd done that before, he'd told everyone and that had never changed anything. There'd been the party, of course, but that was really just par for the course right there, nothing out of the ordinary at all. Tony had kissed him, of course, and while that was new in a way he wasn't sure how that could've done it. Then Tony had... oh God.

"Tony, where did you get the design for that pumpkin?"

"The one we left in bits on the floor?" Tony shrugged. "A website. I looked at a lot of them, Steve. For months. I mean, I can probably find it if it's that important."

"I think it might be."

They got out of bed while Tony flicked through all the sites he knew, searching for the design he'd settled on in the end, the one he and Steve had carved more times than Steve could honestly remember. Then they put in the call to Dr. Strange who confirmed it shortly after, to Steve's exasperated amusement that maybe bordered just briefly on dismay. Maybe Tony wouldn't be using quite so much occult symbolism in his next Halloween project. In fact, once Dr. Strange was over and out, Steve forbade him to ever carve a pumpkin again. 

"I guess it was evil," Tony told him, as they finally swept away the remains of the broken pumpkin from the workshop floor. "It did have to die."

It was an odd kind of day after that. They told the others what had happened, Steve not really sure why unless it was intended as some kind of cautionary tale against invoking incomprehensible magics to cause bizarre time loops that would come close to driving team members totally out of their mind. It seemed it was something about Steve having been the one who'd finished that original pumpkin that very first day, and Tony apparently couldn't help but point out over and over that it could just as easily have been him. In a way, Steve was glad it hadn't. As much respect as he had for Tony, as much as he cared for him, he did not want to think of him reliving that day the way he had. He didn't know how he would've held up. In fact, knowing Tony, he'd still have been working on a technological way to return time to the norm. Steve looked at him as Peter went into Science Mode attempting to explain magic in a way that Steve was happy to gloss over; Tony looked back and smiled. Tony remembered. Steve smiled back. Apparently he didn't regret it at all.

Tony bought a temporary replacement for his ruined rug on eBay, just until he got back to Nepal. Steve and Peter helped Jarvis clear up the residual party mess and when MJ came in from rehearsals she brought enough pizza to feed an army. Tony wouldn't let him check on any of the people whose lives he'd tried to save, not a single one of them; he supposed it made sense, since not knowing would gnaw at him but knowing, he didn't like to think what that would do. Tony was right, which was beginning to be a recurring theme. Then a quick crisis down in Florida took them away for half of the night - thankfully no one was injured and Steve was sort of grateful for the action in a way, the new action, the new day and the new start. His suit felt less constricting, his shield lighter though nothing had changed. Really, in the end, he was just glad he wasn't getting ready to spend yet another evening dressed up as Han Solo. 

They came back and ate and talked around the table; Steve found ten minutes to glance at the paper with November 1st printed there on the cover once the others had headed for bed. It wasn't long after that he went that way himself, at the end of the new day.

But he was still awake at 03:58:04, not sure that he wanted to sleep through it, not sure he could have even if he had wanted to. He watched the seconds tick by on the little luminous clock by the bed, saw 58 minutes become 59 without the clock so much as thinking about stopping, though he supposed that would've been the height of irony. The time passed. He told himself he hadn't been expecting it to be otherwise but he knew that was only half true at the most. He might not have been expecting the chill and the silence before his 6am alarm but he'd dreaded it all the same. 

And then, as the hands of the clock clicked by to 4am, the door opened across the room. It let in too much light just for a moment and Steve blinked against it but didn't look away. He knew who it was. Tony slipped inside the room and crossed to the bed in what was at least vaguely like pajamas, his footsteps padding softly on the hard floor. Steve turned back the blankets like an invitation - an invitation that Tony accepted with a shiver as he settled down out of the relative chill of the room. 

"So, how was the first day of the rest of your life?" Tony asked, as he slid one chilly hand across Steve's chest and settled closer. 

It probably should've been awkward but Tony treated it all like it was just the next logical step for them, like there was nothing odd about it at all; Tony didn't offer an explanation why he was there, didn't look like he was thinking about doing so from what Steve could see of his face in the near total dark of his room, and Steve didn't ask for one. He realised he was starting to think that same way, too. 

Steve smiled and settled closer. "I'm looking forward to tomorrow," he said.


End file.
